Christie Brinkley says women have lived 'too long' being influenced by the 'numbers'
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Some women in Hollywood are worried about the repercussions of aging — but actress and model Christie Brinkley isn’t one of them.
“Women have lived their lives too long being influenced by the numbers, and we had so many rules about those numbers: ‘Oh, you’re turning 30, you’re going to have to cut your hair, and, oh, that’s skirts a little short,'” Brinkley, 65, said recently during a visit to AOL’s Build Studio. “But nowadays, we’re ignoring those numbers.”
Brinkley, who has just begun rehearsals for the reprisal of her famed role as Roxie Hart in the Broadway show Chicago, says women in 2019 don’t live by the same rules as their mothers did. “We are the generation that did know how to eat right, that did know how to exercise,” said Brinkley. “Those numbers don’t mean what they used to.”
Brinkley is far from alone in her desire to rethink how women view aging.
ForTwin Peaks actress Mӓdchen Amick, that means pushing for more “real” women onscreen. “I’m 48, and I’ve chosen not to do anything as far as fillers or Botox or anything aggressive in trying to look younger,” Amick said at AOL’s Build Studio. “I would really like to see more women who are aging beautifully on film and television, because if you don’t show it then you don’t know what it looks like, and it creates anxiety for young women who are aging.”
Rebel Wilson, the star of Isn’t It Romantic, may still be in her 30s, but she’s shattering another stigma onscreen: weight. “The average size of the American woman is size 16-18, which I am, that’s my exact size, but when you look at representation in film, less than 1 percent of films show plus-size women,” Wilson said at AOL’s Build Studio. “Particularly when it comes to romantic roles, so what I loved when the studio brought me this concept is that they wanted me for the lead role. That’s never happened, and I’ve been working for 20 years.”
This HuffPost/Yahoo/CARE survey was conducted by telephone Jan. 21-30, among a random national sample of 1,008 adult women, with 71 percent reached on cellphones and 29 percent on landlines. Results have a 3.6 percentage point error margin for the full sample, including design effects due to weighting. The survey was produced by Langer Research Associates of New York. N.Y., with field work by Issues & Answers of Virginia Beach, Va.
